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2 June 1990

IT’S good to know that, in the world of automation, there is still room
for good old human error. After searching the jungle swamps around the launch
pad near Kourou in French Guiana, the European Space Agency and Arianespace
have found out why the 36th launch of their Ariane rocket failed. Flight
36 blew up soon after lift off, destroying the satellites on board. The
cause was a failure of the water supply to one of the four monster Viking
rocket motors. The culprit, apparently, was a blockage in the main water
valve. And the cause of the blockage? ‘A piece of cloth.’

The most likely reason for this being there, say the French, is ‘unusual
servicing’. Feedback translates this as meaning that someone left a bit
of cleaning rag in the pipe.

* * *

THE latest Sean Connery film, Hunt for Red October, is all about a Russian
submarine equipped with a magneto-hydrodynamic, or MHD, drive. Unusually,
for hokum films of this kind, the throwaway lines about cryogenics and superconductors
are pretty accurate. Drives of this type rely on a very powerful magnetic
field which must be generated by superconducting coils cooled by cryogenics.
That said, we’re less convinced about the mastery of colloquial English
attributed to the Russians in the film. ‘Do you speak English?’ shouts an
American naval officer at his Russian counterpart at the height of an emergency.
‘Good, then get your butt over here!’

* * *

HERE is something to strike terror in the heart of hi-fi ‘tweaks’, those
people who can never resist tweaking their audio systems to make them sound
just a little bit better.

Four or five years ago North American tweaks, the tweakist of all, tried
coating their compact discs with a protective sealant material called Armor
All, which is sold for use on cars. This, they said, lets the laser in the
player read the digital pits on the disc more accurately. True or false,
there are tweaks who would rather die than admit otherwise.

After a while, the British hi-fi press took up the story, and a lot
of people round the world have now Armor All’d their precious CDs.

Now comes a frantic fax from Sam Tellig of the American specialist hi-fi
magazine Stereophile. Tellig has been getting reports from people who have
Armor All’d their discs and now find that the first ones they treated are
starting to disintegrate. No one can blame Armor All for this: their product
is intended for use on cars, not CDs.

The tweaks will insist that treated discs sound better. But, faced with
the risk of no sound at all after five years, the hunt is now on for another
magic potion which removes all traces of Armor All from CDs and puts them
back to as near as possible their original condition. The favourite remedy
so far is ordinary washing-up liquid, which under normal circumstances no
one in their right mind would dream of putting on a precious record.

Perhaps now, the tweaks will stop tweaking, and start listening to music
instead.

* * *

SORRY to start harping on about phones again, but it’s one of those
subjects that won’t go away. Last winter, a caller to a phone-in radio programme
claimed that he was being charged for cellphone calls which failed to get
through. Technically this should be impossible but, as cellphone calls cost
up to 40p a minute, we asked both Cellnet and Vodafone, Britain’s two cellphone
service operators, about it. In each case we received reassurances that
it is impossible for the system to bill for calls that fail to get through.
Somehow, we were not convinced. Now, nearly six months later, we have teased
out a fuller answer.

It is true that anyone using a mobile cellphone to call an office or
domestic fixed phone will not be charged if they get an engaged tone, either
because the called number is busy or because there are no spare radio frequencies
to make the connection. Nor will people who phone from a home or from an
office fixed phone to a mobile cellphone be charged if they get an engaged
tone.

But, and here’s the nasty bit, if as often happens someone calling a
mobile cellphone from a home or office fixed phone gets the standard recorded
message that the number is ‘not available’ (because the cellphone is switched
off), then they will pay for that call.

Even after five years of cellphones, few people realise that they always
pay through the nose when calling a mobile from home or office. Whether
the mobile is across the country or across the street, British Telecom charges
all phone calls to all mobiles at the M rate, which at peak times is 38p
per minute. And this is the rate you pay every time you call a cellphone
and get a recorded message that the number is unobtainable.

* * *

NEW SCIENTIST has devoted a fair amount of space over the years to pleas
for the use of plain English in science writing. Indeed, at times we may
have some what arrogantly implied that we’re not so bad at science writing
ourselves. Now, we must doff our hats to a greater exponent. This (abbreviated)
extract comes from an American newspaper, in answer to a reader’s inquiry
about how photosynthesis works: ‘Plants contain a pigment called chlorophyll,
which in turn is full of tiny bacteria-like molecules . . . it’s gruesomely
complicated . . . basically, an electron gets knocked upside the head by
a photon (a unit of light) and wanders to the end of an extremely funky
molecule . . . the plant is able to use a simple form of electricity to
start separating carbon from carbon dioxide in the air, and neat stuff like
that. If you want more details, go to graduate school.’